In a classified file released in London on Friday, the British intelligence service MI5 said silent film legend Charlie Chaplin was not a Communist agent as suspected by the U.S. FBI, The Guardian reported.
The FBI, at the time led by director J. Edgar Hoover, described Chaplin as one of “Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks” and asked MI5 to gather information that would help them keep the star of 'The Last Dictator’ and ‘City Lights’ out of the United States.
In an extensive file released at the National Archives on Friday, MI5 concluded: “It may be that Chaplin is a communist sympathizer but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a 'progressive', or radical."
MI5 focused on whether Chaplin presented a national security risk, while the determining factor for the FBI was the comedian’s communist sympathies.
Sir Percy Sillitoe, then chief of MI5, was quoted as saying: “We have no trace in our records of this man, nor are we satisfied that there are any reliable grounds for regarding him as a security risk.”
The FBI, which accumulated a file of more than 2,000 pages on Chaplin, also assumed that the famous actor was born in Paris instead of London and his real name was Israel Thornstein.
MI5 rejected this assumption as well, saying in its secret file that there was “no evidence that Chaplin's name is or ever has been Israel Thornstein,” and the suggestion that Paris might had been his birthplace came to nothing.
Chaplin was hounded by the FBI, particularly after his famous statement in 1940s, when he said: “There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad.”
He always denied being a communist, but decided not to contest the decision of the United States to ban him from returning to America in 1953, and settled in Switzerland.
“I am a victim of lies and vicious propaganda,” said Chaplin, who died in his sleep in 1977 in Vivey, Switzerland, at the age of 88.
